Free up disk space

[dfumento]

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/arc ... giving.php

[mattbiernat]

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/arc ... giving.php

thats why the first thing i did when i got my T60 was turn off all the RR back ups and System Restore. If anything goes wrong i can get my system back to normal in 7 minutes from a single RR back up.

[pae77]

Personally, I have found system restore to be very useful from time to time and therefore I wouldn't want to completely turn it off.

However, by default both XP and Vista allocate and use way more space for system restore than is necessary for most users. In XP it was easy to resize the amount of space system restore could use by just moving a slider. As the article referenced in the first post in this thread points out, it is also possible in Vista to resize the amount of space System Restore can use although it is not quite as simple to do as it was in XP.

Vista by default will use up to 15% of the hard drive for system restore which is quite a lot of space. One restore point I created consumed only about a couple of hundred Mb or so. So I think the default space allocated to system restore in Vista is way more than necessary.

In Vista there is a command string that must be entered from a command prompt (which must, btw, be run as an administrator) which is given in the article referenced in the first post in this thread. I cut the space system restore can use on my system from the default 15% down to 3 Gb which is probably still more than is necessary by a considerable margin. I'll probably cut it down further if/when I run low on disk space.

But I do like having at least a couple of restore points to choose from even though I make regular image back ups of my entire drive. It simply is much easier and quicker to use system restore to solve some problems and system restore involves no data loss. Unless you are constantly making image backups, restoring from one of them would most likely involve at least some data loss.

One other thing worth mentioning is that Rescue and Recovery seems to have a lot of, shall we say, "issues." Consequently, I wouldn't want to put all my eggs in that particular basket.